Legend Archive
A browsable archive of long-form animation in four sections: Donghua (Chinese), Anime (Japanese), Korean (webtoon and manhwa adaptations) and Mature (adult-oriented, story-driven, never explicit), from official YouTube channels plus four English-dub channels, sorted into quality tiers. Every play button opens or embeds the YouTube video; nothing is downloaded or rehosted.
The page
- Focus (home): 15 slots holding the best complete, rated series, ranked by
score() in engine/tiers.py (rating, length, upload gaps, anim). Series you have started come first. A slot only changes hands when you finish a series or mark it "Not for me". An original and its English-dub upload share one slot. Tabs: Top 15 (all), Top 15 Anime, Top 15 Donghua, each with its own slots.
- Explore: every series, best first, filterable by Donghua, Anime or Korean.
- Episodes from anywhere: each series is a list of episode slots, each filled from the best free upload on any tracked channel: a single-episode upload first, else the episode inside a compilation, at its chapter time when the description lists chapters (read once per compilation by the scan), else at an even split (marked ≈). Tapping an episode offers Play here (only that stretch of a compilation) or Play on YouTube (opens at the episode's start). Locked uploads are never used.
- My List: what you are watching, want to watch (the "+ My List" button on a series), finished and dropped.
- Opening an episode records your place. Progress is kept in the browser's local storage. Cloud save (on My List) also commits it to
progress.json in this repo using a fine-grained GitHub token kept in the browser (this repo only, Contents read and write); the newer copy wins, so a cleared browser or another device gets everything back. progress.json sits outside engine/, so saving it does not rebuild the site. Back up / Restore to a file also works.
How it runs
- 22:00 IST, GitHub Actions (
.github/workflows/nightly.yml): asks the YouTube Data API for uploads newer than the ones already saved, reads each official channel's members-only playlist ("UUMO" + channel ID) to mark locked uploads, checks new series' comments for AI slop, rebuilds index.html, publishes to GitHub Pages.
- 23:13 IST, Claude scheduled task: researches ratings and completion for unrated series and commits them to
engine/curated.json; that push triggers a rebuild.
- Any push to
engine/ or the workflow rebuilds and republishes in about 2 minutes. Put [skip ci] in a commit message to push without publishing (the curation job does this for its progress commits).
Files
| Path | What |
|---|
engine/config.json | Channels: channels (English-dub, tier 3/6) and candidates (official, subtitled or dubbed with original sound; origin CN, JP or KR) |
engine/curated.json | Hand curation. meta[series_key]: name, rating, rating_src, completed, hide, quality, anim (animation quality 1 to 5; raises or lowers the series' score) with anim_note and anim_tried, members (hide as members-only by hand), members_ok (keep one the members-only detection got wrong), members_checked, merge_into with season_as (file the source as season N of the target), skip_seasons (season labels whose episodes another season already holds), from_ep (start the series at this episode; earlier ones are watched in another key), origin (CN, JP, KR), summary (English premise shown on the series page), summary_status ("unavailable" when researched but no reliable premise was found; the page then says so instead of "not written yet"), note, checked (date last researched), checked_eps (episode count then), verify_tried (date a recalled score could not be verified); the nightly run uses these to work only on deltas |
engine/videos.json, engine/scan/*.json | Saved uploads (one per line), with first_seen dates |
engine/scan/quality.json | AI verdict per checked video: quality, ai, slop, unknown |
engine/mature.py, engine/mature.json | Nightly AniList lookup: tags Seinen, Josei or gory series as Mature (anything AniList flags adult is skipped) and saves official "Also watch on" links; hand settings mature and watch in curated meta win |
engine/tiers.py | Score, tier rules, origin split, members-only hiding (see its docstring) |
engine/epparse.py | Title parser: series, season, episode; drops trailers, clips, members-only |
Secret needed: YT_API_KEY (YouTube Data API v3 key). Free quota is 10,000 units a day; a normal night uses under 500.
